Thread:Evil Tim/@comment-6769189-20190501195941/@comment-1191892-20190504055425

KrytenKoro wrote:

Stating that one work comes after another work implicitly means they are in the same continuity, which also requires them to both be canon. Things being in the same continuity are a subset of things being in the same canon.

No, it doesn't mean that at all. You can say a fanfic is set at a specific point in a timeline, all that says is what events you're planning to acknowledge as having happened. This means there is continuity and that the first work is canon as far as the second is concerned, but it does not necessarily follow that some overarching canon exists. A good example of this would be the current Star Wars mess timeline, where a great many works have been turned into "Legends" and have one-way continuity with the original films.

KrytenKoro wrote:

You get that you're setting yourself up to have to prove that DMC5 is explicitly canon, right?

Canon to what, exactly? What we know is there's a continuity between some of the events in the games and some of the events in the anime and manga and DMC 5. We know that because DMC 5 has a timeline that says so. We do not know for sure if any event not on that timeline necessarily happened in the way it was depicted.

KrytenKoro wrote:

The implicit understanding is that an author's works are canon to each other unless explicitly stated otherwise. That's how it is for all things.

An author, yes. Multiple authors over a long period of time, no. In that instance you get something like the Cthulhu Mythos wherein it's a body of works sharing a central theme and a loose continuity, but only taking specific facets of each other and not necessarily regarding any other facets as having happened.